Its main finding: Just one in seven teens with a diagnosable psychiatric conditions have recently taken medications to treat it.

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) take psychotropic medications to treat associated symptoms of their conditions, such as irritability and anxiety. Usage has increased in recent years, and some recent studies have questioned the evidence base supporting the drugs’ effectiveness in young people with ASD.

A new study, published in a supplement to the November issue of Pediatrics, suggests that coexisting psychiatric conditions and problem behaviors might account for much of that prescribing.

The study, which examined children and teens ages 2 and 17 with autism spectrum disorders, found that 80 percent of children with a comorbid psychiatric condition were taking medication, compared to just 15 percent without any psychiatric comorbidity.

Depending on the condition in question, those with a comorbid disorder were between 5 and 17 times more likely to be taking a psychotropic medication as those without the additional disorder.

The study included 2853 children enrolled in a registry run by the Autism Treatment Network, a consortium of 17 academic medical centers in the United States and Canada that is associated with the advocacy group Autism Speaks.

The registry used DSM-IV-TR criteria and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule to diagnose autistic disorder, Asperger syndrome, or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. It relied on parent reports for information about comorbid psychiatric diagnoses and medication use.

Some metaanalyses have questioned the effectiveness of treating ASD with psychiatric medications, though they have not always taken psychiatric comorbidity into account. Comorbidity is very common in autism spectrum disorders, with studies finding that between 70% and 95% percent qualify for at least one additional psychiatric diagnosis. Other researchers, however, have said these high rates partly reflect overlapping symptoms and problems with diagnostic criteria.

The Pediatrics study didn’t collect information about why the children and teens had been prescribed medication – that is, whether the meds were to treat the comorbid condition, symptoms of the ASD, or both.

However, it found that current psychotropic use was also correlated with high scores on the Child Behavior Checklist, a measure of overall problem behavior. That …

Most psychiatric drugs bear some version of the warning: “Do not drink alcoholic beverages when taking this medication.”

In reality, though, many people taking psych meds drink anyway. They have various reasons: not wanting to curtail their fun, not putting much stock in the warnings, or simply thinking it’s easier to take a proffered drink than explain why they’re turning it down.

Doctors oftentimes don’t bother to talk to patients about potential dangers. Or they tell patients not to drink, but don’t explain why. To make matters worse, because of a lack of studies on the subject, patients inclined to do their own research will have a hard time just how risky it is to drink while taking various kinds of psychiatric medications (I’ve written elsewhere about this troubling lack of evidence).

A widely publicized study that came out last month in the journal Neurology underscores the problem. The findings, which pooled data from 16 studies, showed that people taking SSRI antidepressants like Zoloft or Celexa were 40 percent more likely to suffer a type of stroke caused by bleeding in the brain and 50 percent more likely to suffer any bleeding in the skull.

People who take psychiatric medications long-term are no strangers to stigma, or the threat of it. We perennially face, for example, the question of whether it’s worth risking others’ judgment and the potential negative repercussions of disclosing our conditions — and the fact that we take medication for them.

But you can commit to taking medications long-term and still perpetuate or further the stigma associated with meds. And I don’t just mean that in the sense of keeping your medication regimen secret. Most of us do so in another way altogether that we’re largely unaware of.

The fact is, most people have some kind of internal barometer when it comes to medications – which ones they are willing to take, and which ones they’re not.

This weekend a mother published a New York Timescolumn about how her son came to be diagnosed with ADHD and became a member of the ballooning “Ritalin Generation.”

“Just a little medication,” the teacher told the boy’s mother, “could really turn things around” for the boy, who was having trouble focusing on class worksheets and lining up quietly for transitions between classes.

When the mother firmly responded that she and her husband weren’t going to medicate their son, the teacher backtracked, sounding mock-horrified.

She wasn’t explicitly suggesting medication, she said. The law prohibited such a thing. She just didn’t want him to fall through the cracks – and thus was was merely suggesting the boy’s parents have him evaluated by a psychologist.

The boy was evaluated, and sure enough, he ended up on Ritalin for a short-time, though he quit it on his own a year later, matured out of his former inattentiveness, and eventually ended up a well-adjusted, school-loving honor-roll student – and medication-free.

Such stories are commonly invoked as cautionary tales about the alleged over-diagnosis of ADHD and other behavior disorders and over-prescribing of drugs like Ritalin to keep children’s behavior in check. Teachers recommending meds for disruptive students often feature prominently. In fact, the debate over school involvement in medicating disruptive children showed up as early as the early 1970s.

Psychiatric medications have a lot of potential hidden costs.

We don’t know, for example, how taking them from a young age affects long-term brain and psychological development in kids. They have myriad of side effects, some serious, like diabetes, high cholesterol, neurological impairment and birth defects when taken in pregnancy. They carry stigma, both from others and self-imposed.

But I’m not talking metaphorically about costs here. I’m talking straight-up financial outlays. Taking psychiatric medications can really add up, even for those who have health insurance, and even when they can take generic instead of brand-name drugs.

One big reason is the so-called “medication merry-go-round.”

For years, researchers and health policy experts have been charging that psychiatric medications aren’t adequately tested in children – and a new study gives some powerful ammunition to that critique.

The study, from Pediatrics, looked at clinical drug trials between 2006 and 2011, involving five conditions that cause the greatest “disease burden” for children, as measured by a rating that counts the total years of healthy life lost to disability.

In high-income countries like the United States, three of the five conditions with the highest disease burden among kids were psychiatric disorders: depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

But of the drug studies to treat those conditions, disproportionately few involved children.

The lack of trials is troubling because children and adults don’t necessarily respond to medication in the same way. With psychiatric drugs, that’s a potential problem both for physical reasons – and for psychological and developmental ones.

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the prescribing of psychiatric medication to treat aggression in children.

Specifically, atypical antipsychotic and mood stabilizing drugs, originally developed for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in adults, are now routinely prescribed to treat the aggression that occurs in a variety of childhood psychiatric disorders.

Prescriptions for atypical antipsychotics increased sixfold between 1993 and 2002, and the majority were prescribed to treat non-psychotic aggression, according to a task force that recently published guidelines on how to treat aggression in kids.

At the same time, we’re in the midst of a collective national hand-wringing over how to reduce childhood bullying. Might drugs that curb aggression be the answer?

When I can, I like to feature guest posts from people who have grown up taking psychiatric medications, and for today’s post we’re lucky to have a firsthand account of dealing with medication switches as a new mom from Claire Robson.

Claire began taking antidepressants for mood swings and depression when she was eleven years old. Medication was never a quick fix for her, in large part because it caused intense side effects, primarily extreme exhaustion. Two decades later, she is still adjusting her regimen, most recently because she has had her first child and is struggling with postpartum depression.